If you want to see a ridiculous amount of escalators, take a look at the Collblanc station in Barcelona. It takes 6 escalators to transfer between the L5 and L9S lines.
I'm in a country that uses the 24 hour clock. We also say we meet at 4 or at 10, and are able to derive from context whether that means in the evening or in the morning.
In Poland we’ll most often use the 24hr time even when casually speaking and setting up meeting times, or people talking on tv/radio etc. Imo much simpler and less confusing
Then you don't use the 24 time? What are you even saying. America uses the 24 time too, but it's a large country with many different nations and cultures among it that all do various different things, but I don't get all presumptions and condescending about it like the zealots that demand everyone use metric and 24 hour time and then don't even practice what they preach.
Indeed in speech people use the 12 hr clock here (Netherlands), and you know that nobody wants to meet at 4 in the morning, so people (at least I) translate to 16:00...
We have Dinner at 6, not 18:00 (people would be frowning if you'd say 18:00 out loud there). In messages I think I'm one of the few that always says "16:15" because I just hate ambiguity. If context does not clarify enough people say "in the morning/afternoon/evening/night But (easily) arguably "context" is even worse than AM/PM! Though I can't remember this going wrong ever.
I remember as a kid looking at a digital clock and subtracting 2, then dropping the leading 1 to get a "feel" for the time. Nowadays I'm 24h native and don't like the ambiguity of 12 hr references.
I set al my clocks to 24 hr (unless they have arms).
So yeah, here we are, all cool with our "military time", ahum.
Most supermarkets in Belgium use a coin but some supermarkets (notably Colruyt) lock their shopping cart wheels.
Supermarkets that have a step-less escalator (e.g. to go to the parking lot in the basement) also use these locking wheels to make sure the cart never moves on the escalator. I live near an Albert Heijn that has these.
> Supermarkets that have a step-less escalator (e.g. to go to the parking lot in the basement) also use these locking wheels to make sure the cart never moves on the escalator.
we have a Jumbo near here that is below a parking garage and they have something similar, but it's an entirely passive system. The sloped movable walkway to the parking garage floor has this grooved pattern in it's surface anyway (so you don't slip) and the wheels have a similar pattern so they just sink into the grooves on the walkway. There's a brake pad next to each wheel just above the floor and as the wheel sinks into the grooves the brake pad touches the walkway locking it in place. At the beginning/end of the walkway there are these sloped protrusion into the grooves on the walkway that lift the cart out of the grooves as it reaches the end. No fancy locking system needed.
I'm a native Dutch speaker and tried this out for a bit. It works impressively well although it might be challenging for complete beginners. Maybe you can add an option for the trainer to use more simple language for beginners?
I tried practicing some verb conjugations. The trainer displayed some fill-in-the-blank sentences like "she ... home after class", asking me to conjugate "to walk" in that sentence. However, the audio actually pronounced the full sentence "she walks home after class", giving away the answer.
This is a real pain in the ass in Belgium. Many websites assume I speak French while my native language is Dutch. Some websites only offer a French version of their Belgian storefront, even though Dutch accounts for ~60% of Belgians. I can't imagine what it's like for German-speaking Belgians.
This is not only an issue on websites but also on apps. For example, the Books and Podcasts apps on iOS show me both Dutch-speaking and French-speaking titles. I tried to raise this issue back when I worked at Apple but they only have 1 storefront per country and didn't feel like changing it.
Once upon a time French was used even in the Dutch speaking parts, in government, economy, high society. That was long before the internet got popular though. We've had a long fight to get rid of French in Flanders. Dutch is the only official language in Flanders, and it's the language people speak (except expats, or migrants who haven't learned the language yet).
So when companies still assume Belgium == French, it's not only wrong, but it comes across as very condescending. It feels like they haven't outgrown the times where Dutch was suppressed in favor of French.
And why? If a company wants to use only one language for the whole country, it's better of choosing Dutch (as we indeed account for about 60% of the population). Many of those companies do have a perfectly good Dutch translation, which they use for their site when viewed from the Netherlands. Even if they don't, I much prefer English over French.
You'll be glad to hear (I guess) that the pain is shared by french speaking Belgians.
It happens all the god damn time that the websites render in Dutch (or I guess Flemish) instead of the set Accept Language I have (EN then FR). Google is regularly showing me results in Dutch, most online stores default to Dutch even if they have English and French versions available.
Just imagine, all the websites that correctly (for you) display in Dutch, are websites that we have to change to French. I would guess there are more Dutch-defaulting websites than French ones, but I can't know for sure.
Btw, our neighbor is huge and french speaking too, so I'm not surprised companies coming from there favor French on their site. The same way that NL companies operate in Flanders but less so in Wallonia have their default to Dutch.
Also I'd argue that companies operating in Belgium should default to asking the language instead of guessing, otherwise you'll always anger half of the population.
Glad to hear how the other side of the country experiences things -- that happens not nearly enough, we (and our media) tend to focus too much on our part of the country (in my opinion).
Not glad to hear you have the same problems (only different).
I wasn't really talking about French companies though; I've seen it with large American or Korean companies. I'm gonna say companies like Nvidia or Samsung; I'm not sure about these two exactly, but I've certainly seen it with companies of that caliber.
